Suspicionless surveillance is the term used by Edward Snowden to describe the ambit of the US government's ongoing SIGINT. It is, as I understand it today, a total capability which is limited only by policy. Being a database architect myself, the extent of this capability comes as no surprise. I guess I just finally heard what I needed to hear from Snowden's recent Guardian interview which I will publish here in its entirety...
We interrupt this post to entertain a paranoid fantasy.
As I am writing this, I am having trouble logging into Evernote and also in sending an email confirmation for something else entirely unrelated. And I am considering a phrase called 'direct access' and the likelihood that Cutlass and I here can be on a list which is a million lines long of 'owned computers'. With the presumption that NSA can bruteforce TrueCrypt, and/or are keylogging my machine, there is no doubt that somebody is watching me.
But what if that person watching me were sympathetic to my ethical discipline? What if they were a dude like Spy (of my existential partners Cobb readers may recall) that really is a genuine big brother - somebody who doesn't want to see me get in trouble? Somebody who says, look once you go play in this arena, you're going to lose all your legal support. Somebody on the inside who, for all they can see, is convinced that liberty as we once knew it, is gone and only the fantasy of it remains, but that the only real liberty left is a particular subset, a subset whose definitions are clear within the realm of the watchers, but not so clear in the civilian population.
Well, then we are already dead. Let's have a bourbon. Let bourbon be in America, what vodka is in Russia and let us all sing together as we drown.
Da hoo doray!
That said, I will continue with what I was saying (and search around for my Gadsden flag). But first, a small video.
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